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Almost every tea addiction starts the same – from a simple tea bag. At that point, you rarely know that there are six different tea types, and you probably never heard of tea varieties. When you switch to drinking loose leaf tea, you instantly get overwhelmed by thousands of different types. This topic might be confusing both for those that are new to tea and those that have a lot of tea knowledge.

Confusing Terminology

If you do a quick search on tea varieties, you might get the idea that tea varieties are black, green, white, yellow, oolong and dark tea. Lots of sites are using the right words, but wrong content. Even though tea knowledge is easily accessible to everyone, due to the high amount of copy-paste texts, it might take a bit more time to master the basics and understand the more complex parts.

Tea Varieties – Camellia sinensis var. assamica or var. sinensis

Don't confuse tea varieties with tea types. There are a few tea varieties used for making tea, but only two of them are commercially important - var. assamica and var. sinensis. Var. assamica is indigenous for India, specifically used in Assam, while var. sinensis is used for Chinese, Japanese and Taiwanese teas. There are exceptions, of course, and Japan can use var. Assamica, as well as India is using var. sinensis. The use of tea varieties will depend on the terrain, tea type, flavor profile, and many other factors.

Tea Cultivars – Camellia sinensis var. sinesis cv. Samidori

There are hundreds and hundreds of different cultivars. Japan has its own, China has its own, India has its own. Every tea producing country has its own cultivars. Some can be found in multiple countries. You probably heard of Yabukita, which is a tea cultivar used in Japan for producing different types of tea – from green to black. Some cultivars are good only for specific type or tea, or even specific tea in one category. For example, matcha is made from special cultivars that give unique color and flavor profile, and are the best choice for specific environment, like Samidori. Benifuuki is a special Japanese cultivar used for making black and green tea, and Longjing 43 is a Chinese cultivar used for making the famous Chinese green tea Long Jing, but black tea as well.

Tea Types

Tea types are what we usually call black, green, yellow, white, oolong and dark tea. Although a better word would be „category“. Tea varieties and tea cultivars are used for producing different teas. Therefore, green tea is a very wide category that can contain teas made from both tea varieties and hunderds of different cultivars. For example, sencha is only a type of green tea, and that sencha can be made from dozens of different Japanese tea cultivars that belong to Camellia sinensis var. sinensis tea variety.

(Source: Tea Chronicles ©)

We hope we didn't confuse you even more. Remember, there are only two most commonly and commercially used tea varieties – Camellia sinensis var. sinensis and Camellia sinensis var. assamica, and hundreds of different cultivars, production methods, harvesting times and roasting levels that will give you thousands and thousands of different teas.